Brock has made many significant contributions to economic theory. He is a major figure in developing the theory of optimal capital accumulation for the economy and for the firm. He also carries out important work on the theory of general equilibrium with rational expectations, and on the analysis of nonlinear economic dynamics.

Research Interests

A major theme of my research has been developing the theory and measuring the forces that promote economic stability. Theory includes work on uncovering incentives and pathways for intertemporal and "spatial" smoothing of instabilities. Mathematical methods include finding usable sufficient conditions for asymptotic stability of optimal solutions to infinite horizon optimal control problems. Measurement includes development of statistical methods to uncover hidden patterns in time series data and in panel data that are missed by existing statistical methods. The first set of methods test forecast errors of best-fit models for "left out structure." The mathematical methods originate in dynamical systems theory, chaos theory, and U-statistics theory. The second set of methods uses versions of bootstrap to estimate, given a class of models to test, the null distribution of economically or financially relevant quantities. An example of finance is the bootstrapping, under the null class of models, of the null distribution of conditional means and variances following buy/sell signals of trading strategies. Current theoretical work includes development of a general theory of evolutive expectation formation that tests conventional rational expectations so that the large econometric rational expectations literature can be adapted to efficiently explore the space of alternative expectations mechanisms econometrically.

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